Every Manager Has a Servant Leader Inside

At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us about a demo at [email protected] ?

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“To be honest, we’re good, we’re really Psychologically Safe in our team already”

“Oh good! How do you know?”

“These are just things you know when you’re an experienced leader”

“Ah ok fair enough. Have you done any testing though?”

“Not per se”

“Have you measured it in any way?”

“Not as such but I’m sure the annual survey must cover it somehow”

“Are you talking about it often and getting what everyone else thinks and feels?”

“We did talk about Psychological Safety once, we had a keynote about it a year ago!”

“Is it possible that you feeling Psychologically Safe doesn’t mean everyone else does?”

“Anything is possible but it’s very very improbable, I know my team”

Then at the end of the first few weeks of using our Dashboard they may still be resisting:

“Are you sure the algorithm works? We get a lot of unwarranted red sad faces in some components measuring PS behaviours for some reason, it can’t be right!”

Alongside the “Many Objections Leader” the “In-Denial Leader” is one we meet a lot. I wrote about the mechanisms that bring this reaction on from the extrapolation and projection of individual feelings to group behaviour, to leadership privilege and even to a fear of appearing to have neglected something important (essentially a form of impression management in itself) this week in the Chasing Psychological Safety newsletter.?

Irrespective what motivates people to not do any of the work, in particular, the work to increase Psychological Safety, it needs deconstructing before more of us will have access to methods and tools to diminish our HumanDebt?

This is where organisational permission towards Leadership 2.0 is essential.?

The old kind of management where command and control ruled could afford to brazenly presume on behalf of the “resources” because their state of mind or their wellbeing were never presumed to be a factor in their ability to perform. In this new paradigm, where serving when we lead is more than lip-service and in particular, in the new reality of hybrid, we actually have to create value and to do so, we need to understand our team’s true baselines.?

Command and control leaders didn’t have any mental space for admitting that the truly worthwhile and sustainable work is not the delivery but the foundational one where we work on behaviours to enable dynamics that will ensure that delivery can fly. They had no use for being curious and considerate and open about the way people really felt. They simply placed humans in the slots waterfall was creating and whipped them.?

Coercion over collaboration.?

Fear over passion.

“Or else” over “What do you think?” and certainly over “How do you feel?”

Truthfully, every micro-manager out there knows the end of that era is upon us. There simply is no way left to control everything and instead they have to make it fall in place through care, empathy and a lot of this new type of work that is all about emotions and behaviours.?

Most people are not exclusively the evil middle manager who needs the shackles and the fear-inducing tactics, nor are they the complete servant leader who lives and breathes to help, remove blockers and enable people to be their best, but instead they are somewhere in the middle oscillating between the two extremes these days.?

Someone asked me in an interview yesterday how long till we eradicate HumanDebt - we may never do but we can and ought to relentlessly work on diminishing it. They then asked how long till no one resists the human work anymore and where this part of the work is done before any of the operational parts? Years likely - but not tens, it’s in sight now.?

Undoing the decades of bad habits, toxicity and a tacit convention that allows for borderline abusive behaviours in the workplace will take time, and there will be mountains of objections and denial to weed through.?

All we can collectively do is keep going and helping everyone else up along the way. And once we extend the hand with openness and goodwill people take it. The “but we don’t have the time” guys and the “but we don’t need the work” resistance former command-and-control guys alike.?

When the ways to change the painful status quo are made clear many people step up to the plate, shake the excuses and find ways to be superhero-y by championing better for their teams. And when they get out of the way and facilitate, those teams then take on the human work with gusto and soon soar.?

One of the best parts about our job at PeopleNotTech is seeing this soaring -whether of the team or of the team leader- up close. The same people who seemed to be at lost-cause-level when they resisted the human work and denied the need for it earlier. So much changes so fast towards such positive results when people can access common sense, empathy, care and growing together in efficient teams -once they can and do measure-, that it is truly humbling to witness.?

May you have a week where you see former command-and-control managers, deniers and objectors become advocates and may everyone get more Psychological Safety opportunities thanks to that.?

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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are:?Understand,?Measure?and?Improve

Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at?www.peoplenottech.com?or reach out at?[email protected]?and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.